Dr. Gilbert Pineda grabbed a full bottle of water and chugged all of it in a few gulps.

He shook his head a couple of times. “Focus. Focus. Focus,” he said, only to himself.

Pineda walked down the narrow, stark-white corridor of the emergency department under construction and added up the scene. A man with a bloody bandage on his head. One patient intubated, on life support. Another man with “graphic” gunshot wounds on his arms and legs.

Patients lined up in the hallway, including a guy with a belt wrapped around his thigh like a tourniquet. A man screaming: “I need pain medication!” More screams coming from one of the rooms.

Pineda told himself not to let the yelling distract him — just because patients are loud doesn’t mean they’re critical.

He saw a doctor in a white “moon suit” preparing to decontaminate people exposed to gas.

Eighteen patients total, 13 with gunshot wounds.

Before walking into the Medical Center of Aurora early that Friday morning, Pineda had been up 20 hours. He had worked a 12-hour shift, then gone to dinner with his daughter who was in town from college. He was as tired as he had ever remembered being and went to bed about 11:45 p.m. Thursday.

Pineda was asleep about an hour when his phone rang. It was the hospital’s emergency medical chief, Dr. Frank Lansville. His voice was direct and solemn.

“Gilbert, there has been a mass shooting in Aurora. There may be as many as 20 patients. I need you to go to the emergency department.”

Pineda took a few deep breaths, slipped on a pair of Levis and grabbed his medical bag. As he was leaving, he thought, “Boy, what an idiot you are. You are in your car, backing out of your driveway, and this is something that’s been a dream.”

He turned on the EMS radio in his car. What he heard snapped him alert.

“That’s when it hit,” he said. “This is something real.”

Pineda, the hospital’s EMS medical director, was trained for this; he worked in south-central Los Angeles and L.A. County Medical Center, where a typical weekend could bring 10 gunshot victims at once. He was in an L.A. emergency department when a gunman shot three physicians.

Still, “it’s not the kind of thing that we expect to have in Aurora.”

Pineda went from one patient to the next, unwrapping bandages and checking for signs that shotgun pellets had entered the chest or the bloodstream. One man had 20 pieces of buckshot in his body.

Pineda helped prioritize the patients for X-rays and surgery. Every one of them had at least one nurse.

Pineda said it’s those kind of days that remind him why he chose emergency medicine.

“This is what I trained to do,” he said. “When something like this happens, you just click into this mode of ‘Wow. This is what I like to do.’ Not that I want to see people injured, but if they are injured, I want to have the opportunity to take care of them.”

Jennifer Brown is an investigative reporter for The Denver Post, where she has worked since 2005. She has written about the child welfare system, mental health, education and politics. She previously worked for The Associated Press, The Tyler Morning Telegraph in Texas, and the Hungry Horse News in Montana.

More in News

A wedding and special events’ planning business has agreed to pay a $200,000 settlement to five employees living in the country illegally after allegedly failing to pay them minimum wages and overtime and discriminating against them because of their race.

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.